July visitors to the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in 2026 might have expected that the Smithsonian leadership would have special events for America’s 250th. Alas, they didn’t. Nor were there in 2025 to lead into this year. This was no mere oversight, according to “Saving America’s Story,” an extensive 162-page report from the White House’s Domestic Policy Council released on July 4.
Though President Lyndon Johnson’s January 1964 dedication of the museum included the hope that the “iconic artifacts” collected for it “should be used to foster patriotism,” the report concludes that the NMAH under its current Smithsonian leadership “has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
The new report is in response to Executive Order (EO) 14253, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which was signed by President Trump on March 31, 2025. In that EO, President Trump sought “to restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness—igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
To that end, the EO required (among other things) the Vice President and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to collaborate with Congress on prohibiting future expenditures on Smithsonian exhibits “that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” With regard to the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum, the EO directed that the museum celebrate the achievements of women and not “transgender women,” i.e., men who claim to be women.
“Saving America’s Story” responds to the call to assess the Smithsonian’s work in bold and distressing detail. It isn’t merely that the museum failed to hold any events on July 4 in 2025 and 2026. Nor even that leadership eliminated “patriotic Star-Spangled Banner flag-folding ceremonies celebrating America’s flag, or any other special programming, to celebrate Flag Day.” No, the most benign part of the Smithsonian treatment is their neglect.
The National Museum of American History has actually eliminated the phrase “American history” from its mission statement. Instead, the NMAH is all about “the complexity of our past” and refocusing on “the entirety of the Americas, not just our part of North America.” The goal in presenting United States history, when they deign to do so, is to “problematize” it. This means presenting our country and its most significant figures as villains.
When it comes to our nation’s beginnings, Columbus is a “murderer,” “slaver,” “killer,” and “thief” who committed genocide according to the NMAH. In the Upending 1620 exhibit, the Pilgrims are treated as colonizers, not “founders,” and we are told that Thanksgiving should be celebrated as “a National Day of Mourning” and an opportunity to “reexamine these stories” and challenge one’s “preconceptions.” The museum’s internal documents show that leadership has pushed the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which claims that America was founded on slavery and is an inherently racist and evil nation, as our true story.
This is all consistent with the treatment of the 1776 generation. In Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness, the NMAH’s programming supposedly “celebrating” America’s 250th, ignores the Founders entirely or limits discussion of them to their real and alleged wrongdoings, mostly involving slavery, racism, and sentiments about immigrants. So, too, with the NMAH’s Becoming US “educational” curriculum, which doesn’t have anything about the Founding Fathers (even Washington or Jefferson), the Declaration, or the Constitution.
The rest of the museum’s exhibits and programming all proceed from the false claim that America is a racist nation on “stolen land.”
“To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History,” the report concludes, “it is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy, and shame.” No surprise that the museum wants to tell the story of America as, at best, waves of immigrants continually transforming the country. The museum leadership doesn’t really like this country. In one revealing detail, “Saving America’s Story” recounts how a 2023 DEI report from the museum highlighted a staff member’s belief that things will be better when this nation “exists in hindsight.”
In addition to the above fixations, NMAH has similarly approached all history through the lens of radical transgender ideology. All exhibits operate under the assumptions that “girls can be assigned male at birth,” that “gender identity” is “fluid,” and that the phrase “gender identity disorder” should not be used.
The material in exhibits and supposedly educational materials created or endorsed by NMAH leadership focuses on demonizing white people, valorizing illegal aliens, and promoting transgenderism and abortion. In the name of transgenderism, the museum had sexually explicit drag queen material available to young children. In fact, almost all of the exhibits and programming were geared toward extreme left-wing activism, which NMAH both promoted and occasionally participated in. For instance, the museum collaborated with illegal alien activists to remove a North Carolina sheriff from office.
The Organization of American Historians (OAH), of which NMAH director Anthea Hartig was formerly president, responded to the report in a brief statement that claimed that the NMAH does include things “to celebrate” about America in its collection. Strangely, it doesn’t mention any of them. Nor does it have any response to the accusation of engaging in activism rather than legitimate scholarship.
Instead, the OAH statement includes the usual rhetoric about how “Saving America’s Story” is about “the attempt to turn back the clock to a time when U.S. history was taught as the history of white Christian men who conquered a continent, U.S. military leaders who rarely lost a battle, and U.S. presidents who were single-handedly responsible for national greatness, all under the cover of ‘anti-DEI’ and ‘anti-woke’ crusading.”
The historians assert the independence of the Smithsonian, telling readers that it is not part of the Executive Branch and must be independent and free to do what “historians” think is right.
Historians, however, don’t agree on either the vision or the activism. Here’s to Congress using the power of the purse to rein in this out-of-control anti-American institution that no longer has “American history” as part of its mission.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
